RECENCY, PRIMACY, AND MEMORY - REAPPRAISING AND STANDARDIZING THE SERIAL POSITION CURVE

In this paper we consider the serial position curve in immediate verbal free recall. A large literature has argued that two components of the serial position curve, recency and primacy, reflect the functioning respectively of short-term and of long-term memory. However, there are a number of difficulties in interpreting the recency effect as a phenomenon uniquely associated with short-term memory. Moreover, the serial position curve has been used widely for clinical investigations in patients with memory deficits. This is despite the lack of norms for the measures derived from the curve. We present a set of standardised norms based on 321 Italian normal subjects. These norms are shown to be applicable both to an English speaking population, and to three groups of brain damaged-patients, namely Alzheimer's, amnesics, and frontals. The standardised norms offer a clinical and experimental tool which, coupled with a multiple single case approach, allows us to show dissociations and double dissociations among the performance patterns obtained from all three pathological groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of a possible interpretation of the recency effect as a emergent property of all types of memory system, including verbal short-term memory. Taking into account previous literature as well as our own data, the recency effect in immediate verbal free recall is here interpreted in terms of a two-component view of verbal short-term memory. Acknowledgement. We are grateful to Richard Wright, University of Missouri St. Louis, for his help in finding the original report by Nipher (1876). We are also grateful to Cristina Trivelli who tested the majority of the frontal patients, to Val Wynn for testing the English language subjects, to Alan Baddeley for his advice throughout the organisation of the study and to Mirella Crevacore for her editorial help. This research was partly supported by a Grant of the CNR, n. 91.00441. PF40 to H.S. Data presented in Table II were collected by the "Gruppo Italiano per lo Studio Neurologico dell'Invecchiamento" and reported in the Italian Journal of Neurological Sciences, supplement 8, 1987.